Five more things that suck about gaming in 2017

09 August 2017

By Chris Kemp

A great man once said, “Any article that gets more than 12 views deserves a follow-up.” And by “a great man”, I mean me. And by “once said”, I mean 7 seconds ago. And by “12 views”, I mean 11 taps on the F5 key, spaced appropriately apart so as not to arouse suspicion.

Needless to say, a bunch of news made me mad this week. It made me realise I hadn’t quite beaten all the life out of this dead horse yet (or some other disturbing metaphor that we say frequently but never question).

Miners taking mah GPUs

Yeah, just what the actual shit is going on here anyway?

When they came for my 60fps, I said nothing. When they began releasing PC games months after they came to console, still I said nothing. When they dropped crappy ports with no PC customisation options, I kept silent. When they took our dedicated servers, stopped releasing major FPSes on the platform that birthed them, called us a dead group, called us pirates, crippled us with abusive DRM, shoveled crap down our throats and made us pay for it, still I did not speak out.

But I’ll be damned if I stand idly by and let a bunch of morons chasing their fortunes doing monkey maths for internet bananas take our GPUs. Getting between a gamer and their GPU is serious business, and instead of doing nothing this time, I’m taking matters into my own hands and complaining about it on the internet. You’re welcome, bros.

We reward the wrong things

In 2017, only two types of games get recognition, sales and attention: tired, worn-out franchises, and meme-games. If your game isn’t the tenth iteration of a military FPS, or The Floor is Lava Simulator 2017: Mom is at the Mall, you’re probably going to sell about as well as Fruit Chutney Nik-Naks. And please don’t comment that you like Fruit Chutney Nik-Naks – just stay in the shadows, you f**king degenerate.

Gamers tend to beg for innovation, creativity and “something fresh”, but will then without fail go ahead and spend their money on something that does none of those things. But shit, I like to watch Masterchef while eating KFC and criticising the contestants’ food for not having the correct mouthfeel, so maybe I’m exactly like you and we all just like to stick with what’s comfortable, rather than ever take a chance on something new. That being said, Titanfall is better than Call of Duty and Battlefield, and y’all are missing out on the actual best multiplayer shooter out there while still witnessing your mothers being insulted by pre-teens.

The initial crunch eases you into a moist, velvety mouthfeel and a deceptively spicy finish. This is the perfect dish.

Everything is criticised

Pick pretty much any game, and you’ll find someone complaining about it. You could produce a game about sentient toasters, and someone would complain that the game promotes violence, or that all the toasters are white, or that one of them looks like Donald Trump.

We’ve taken useful conversations around representation in gaming, and turned it into an absolute poop-cyclone of pointless bickering and vitriol over anything that could remotely be perceived as standing in opposition to the pursuit of a homogenous dystopian nightmare where society is a gelatinous ameboid mass and the jellyfish have risen out of the ocean to be our overlords.

Sorry, I’m currently working on my new horror novel They Float, and sometimes I get sidetracked.

Things aren’t criticised enough

Oh man, what a bait-and-switch! Powerful stuff. While we’re really happy to complain about cisgendered dinosaurs and the lack of racial diversity in Fish Tank Deathmatch, we seem to have no concerns at all over games being released that are bugged to hell, unfinished, offensively bad or terribly optimised.

I mean, we’ll all band together to post some really strongly worded forum rants, but we still buy the games, play them and get the DLC, so I think it’s safe to say we don’t have any execs shaking in their padded chairs. Can we stop focusing so much on bullcrap that doesn’t matter, and start criticising games based on their ability to be games?

The bar has gotten so low that we barely acknowledge when something is unfinished garbage and accept it as a matter of course. If the next game I review is bugged and broken when I get it, I’m going to give it a 40 and dab on all you haters.

That little purple bro on the right is about to crack some skulls.

Where the hell is 60fps

We can’t afford to just let this go. That’s how the emus won Australia. Back in the early days of the last-gen consoles, 60fps promises were made. Higher frames per second was something that developers actually aspired to, something that marketing teams zeroed in on.

Aside from the fact that for the most part it didn’t happen, what concerns me more is that nobody seems to care. The new-new-gen consoles (ugh) are all advertising 4K, but will continue to run games at 30fps. So now you can see in very clear detail how sluggish and crappy the game feels. Yay?

Don’t believe the propaganda, my console brethren. If anyone dares to start that tired BS of human eyes being incapable of detecting frame rate differences, feel free to take your lazy-eyed ass over to the corner and sit with the Nik-Naks guy. This is not a fight anyone should be giving up on. 1080p60fps is a helluva lot better than 4K30fps. Trust me on this. Your TV probably doesn’t display 4K anyway, which makes the whole thing about as fruitful as trying to nuke the jellyfish menace.

How can we few small fish take on such giant sharks ?
It just seems that we are moving backwards or maybe I am just playing the wrong games, supporting the wrong developers or just expecting to much ? NO! We cannot be expecting to much, what we are expecting is the same damn commitment to games we received a decade ago. Instead we are fed Nik-Naks to shut up ! DLC pre-alpha beta access 3-days earlier flavoured Nik-Naks !

P.S: They Float . . . Floaters ? Cover art pending ?

Kyle

– 1080p6ps what on earth Chris, stop eating the nik naks from the guys selling you nik naks out of their coats..

I am currently hating the mining revolution that’s currently happening, if only someone could please just mine everything there is to mine so its pointless to anyone else to even start trying.

Also, what is up with companies advertising games ONE YEAR before they are released…looking at you Bioware. Hype trains are sooo 2016.

Wikus Carstens

Haha I just rather said nothing . . .
I think the advertising well before release is fine, I need to budget that long 🙁
BUUUT I just cannot get over the “buy a half-done game at full price that gets finished a year+ later only through paid DLC” kind of crap!

P.S: Could go for some Nik-Naks right about now xD

Tank Muller

PTA North Spar has a Nik-Naks special going on right now 😉

Global_Saffer

Chutney for the win!

I’ll agree with you on the 60fps thing though. It’s why I don’t really play my Xbox much and favor the pc.

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